Now we wait for the fallout. No, not the immediate reaction of the markets. Nothing can be read into anything that happens on that particular roller-coaster fun ride. But what happens in the real economy over the next few months. Even yesterday there were commenters questioning how long it would take the rate to fall back to zero again.

Photo: Scott Eisen/Bloomberg News

It can only be the jobs figures, or more correctly what they hide. And they are designed to hide the fact that the US economy, the real economy not the fictitious one manufactured for Wall Street’s benefit, is on the rocks.

So, I continue to predict, against most other sources anticipating the move, that the Fed will not raise interest rates tomorrow (US time). In all honesty, they can’t take that risk. The banks wouldn’t like it anyway, as they will lose their risk-free, do-nothing, profit money.

I am going to break down this article into point format to make it easy to see why that is so, although the article is already well written and researched in itself. As Roberts explains, he predicted back in early 2004 that this would come about within 20 years. This, his latest article shows how the prediction is progressing, with just nine years to go. I think I have faithfully extracted all of the salient points made, but you could also give the original a read for yourself, if you want to know more.

1. US real household income has declined ranging from 17.1% for the lowest level to 4.8% for the highest level, since 2006.
2. Only the top 1% of income earners have seen an increase in that same period.
3. Those income declines are based on official figures. More realistic figures suggest that real incomes are now below what they were in the late 1960s – early 1970s.
4. During the so-called economic recovery since 2009 the US labour force has shrunk due to a sustained decline in participation rate.
5. In March 2015, more than 93 million Americans of working age were not in the labour force, a historical record.
6. The true US unemployment rate is currently 23%, not the 5.2% reported figure.
7. In 2014, 38% of all American workers made less than $20,000
8. In 2014, 51% of all American workers made less than $30,000
9. In 2014, 63% of all American workers made less than $40,000
10. In 2014, 72% of all American workers made less than $50,000.
11. The scarcity of jobs and the low pay are direct consequences of jobs offshoring.
12. The US economy is only creating lowly-paid part-time jobs, such as waitresses, bartenders, retail clerks, and ambulatory health care services.
13. Full-time jobs with benefits continue to shrink as a percentage of total jobs.
14. Half of all 25-year-olds cannot afford to form households and are living with parents.
15. The Finance industry is the only sector of the US economy that is growing.
16. Finance is not a productive activity. It is a looting activity.
17. The financial sector is a grave threat to the economy.
18. The absence of growth in consumer income means there is no demand growth to drive the economy.
19. Consumer indebtedness limits the ability to increase spending.
20. Lower consumer spending means limited appeal for new investment by businesses.
21. The economy simply cannot go anywhere, except down.
22. An economy that doesn’t make things does not innovate.
23. The economic and social infrastructure is collapsing
24. The family itself is collapsing.
25. The rule of law is collapsing.
26. The accountability of government is collapsing.
27. (Roberts doesn’t mention this but I am adding it anyway) The national physical infrastructure is also collapsing.
28. The prospect of no jobs means the demand for college education declines.
29. Becoming indebted by study only to find available employment cannot service student loans becomes a bad economic decision.
30. University administrations spend 75% of the university’s budget on themselves.
31. The prospects for good full time university teaching faculty with a career before them has collapsed.
32. The demand for university education will collapse and with it science and technology.
33. The rise of the neoconservative hubris of US world hegemony has resulted in 14 years of wars that have cost $6 trillion (and not a single positive outcome).

As Roberts says: “It is a reasonable conclusion that a social-political-economic system so incompetently run, already is a Third World country.”

I predict that the US has a lot further to sink into becoming a failed state, at war with and within itself, yet, and nine years seems to me to be a generous estimate for all this to come to pass.

…and the US is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg, under which floats all of western civilisation.

Follow Blog via Email

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 58 other followers

Favourite Quotes

Believe nothing, merely because you have been told it or because it is traditional, or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings, that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.
The Buddha

The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.
Albert Einstein

Sometimes our light goes out, but is blown again into instant flame by an encounter with another human being.
Albert Schweitzer

It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
Henry Ford

Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.
Henry Kissinger (Who controlled Henry Kissinger?)

Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only.
Henry Thoreau

Many people today work jobs they don’t like, to buy things they don’t need, so that they can impress people they don’t like. But at the end of life these people will deeply regret spending their lives trying to impress other people. Be humble and seek to impress yourself only. Let other people worry about chasing status. This perspective is extremely liberating.
Simplicity Institute

What I hear, I forget;
what I see, I remember;
what I do, I understand.
Old Chinese saying

It is the microbes that will have the last word.
Louis Pasteur

We have already seen cuts to services and increases in taxes and user fees, and we can expect a great deal more of that dynamic as central authorities emulate hypothermic bodies. In other words, they will cut off the circulation to the fingers and toes in order to preserve the core. This is of course, a survival strategy, from the point of view of the core. But it does nothing good for the prospects of ordinary people, who represent the fingers and the toes.
Nicole Foss

Society is an anonymous enterprise for living a life of secondhand emotions.
Josephin Peladan 1885

Without a sense of the past and its meaning, without narratives that weave the events of our daily lives into patterns that touch the principles that matter, we lack the essential raw materials of thought, and so our collective reasoning processes, such as they are, spit out the same rehashed nonsolutions over and over again.
John Michael Greer (The Archdruids Report)

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
Rainer Maria Rilke

I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.
Rainer Maria Rilke

In order to arrive at what you do not know, you must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession.
Thomas Stearns Eliot

Talk does not cook the rice.
Chinese Proverb

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

...western Health Care... is mostly, a method of social control and a means to generate economic growth.
William Hunter Duncan (http://offthegridmpls.blogspot.com.au/)

...gardening puts me at ease in a world where it is not easy to be at ease, comforted in the knowledge that, should the world change, I will be ready, or more ready anyway, than I would be had I pretended I am not part of this earth, that I am not part of ecosystems. I am of this earth, and every day my plants remind me.
William Hunter Duncan (http://offthegridmpls.blogspot.com.au/)

The general population doesn't know what is happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know.
Noam Chomsky

Life wasn't meant to be easy, my child, but take courage: it can be delightful!
George Bernard Shaw

You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.
Vernon Howard

When we think about climate change (if we think about it at all), we envision rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, freakish storms, hellish wildfires, and rising sea levels. Among other things, this will result in damaged infrastructure and diminished food supplies. These are, of course, manifestations of warming in the physical world, not the social world we all inhabit and rely on for so many aspects of our daily well-being and survival. The purely physical effects of climate change will, no doubt, prove catastrophic. But the social effects including, somewhere down the line, food riots, mass starvation, state collapse, mass migrations, and conflicts of every sort, up to and including full-scale war, could prove even more disruptive and deadly.
Michael T. Klare - The Hunger Wars in Our Future

Remember that fact and faith are mutually exclusive things. If you have facts you have proof, therefore you don't need faith. Conversely, with no facts there is no proof and faith is needed to believe something. But faith is more emotion than logic, so almost anything can be justified. And that's where the Church gets its power.
Martin I Henry - The Anunnaki (The Chronicles of the Guardians)

...from nature’s perspective, we’re simply one more species that overshot the carrying capacity of its environment and is about to pay the routine price...
John Michael Greer - The Falling Years: An Inhumanist Vision

It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of the mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
Ben Okri

Money is not what it used to be and not what it seems.
JH Kunstler http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/04/are-you-going-to-entropy-faire.html

Hope and history are sisters: one looks forward and one looks back, and they make the world spacious enough to move through freely. Obliviousness to the past and to the mutability of all things imprisons you in a shrunken present.
Rebecca Solnit
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175701/tomgram%3A_rebecca_solnit%2C_what_comes_after_hope/

To claim that there are many gods, a few gods, only one god, or no gods at all is to insist on something about which human beings have no independently verifiable source of information whatsoever.
John Michael Greer
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/a-question-of-values.html

Knowing many stories is wisdom.
Knowing no stories is ignorance.
Knowing only one story is death.
John Michael Greer
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com.au/2006/05/knowing-only-one-story.html

We should live as if we were in public view, and think, too, as if someone could peer into the inmost recesses of our hearts. The Blight which assails us is not in the localities we inhabit but in ourselves. We are more wicked together than separately. If you are ever forced to be in a crowd, then most of all you should withdraw into yourself. Never trust another to do your thinking. Even a maston.
Gideon Penman of Muirwood Abbey - from The Blight of Muirwood (Legends of Muirwood Book 2) by Jeff Wheeler.